Hi, I am the owner of www.helpedia.com. Though i have it for almost an year, i did not have much time to make it generate some cash. I have started to use mod_rewrite so that some url's like: article.php?id=1&page=2 are converted to article1_page2.php My question is : does it matter a lot for google, google search engines or ads if the extension is PHP or HTML ? I've noticed that sometimes on pages like news.php?post=1 , news.php?post=2 the google ads are generic, would this mean that google adsense does not read the page for text for different attributes in the url ? I'm a noob and I'm not ashamed to admit it, every help and tip is appreciated. Thanks, Marius
My understanding and experience is that the filetype does not make a difference, and that the odd "?" in an url doesn't, either (As long as there aren't too many - I don't imagine the adwords robot is more savvy than the regular googlebot in this regard), but that having the article's name in the url can have a positive impact, especially when combined with on-page factors. On page keyword density is really the very most important thing in my experience, though. The mod-rewrite stuff will be a bigger help with SERPS, though.
Also, I've heard that although most URL's with a "?" don't cause a problem, google in particular doesn't like URLS that pass a variable called "ID", for example: www.whatever/?ID=something If that is indeed the case then it might be best to check to be sure you aren't passing any variables called ID with POST/GET/etc.
Extension doesn't matter. Google is also getting better at indexing various URLs, although mod-rewrite will still help. The important thing is what you rewrite to. You'll be better off using something like article1-page2.php than article1_page2.php. Or even better something like page2/article1.php